Saturday, January 14, 2017

Pretty much everything I've believed in and championed over the last 15
years in terms of blogging, social media, freedom for anyone to speak
out without gatekeepers etc. has come true.
And the
result is what we've seen in 2016 ... President Trump, Brexit, the
impeachment of Dilma Rousseff etc. All driven by massive disinformation
campaigns across social media. We are in a "post-truth" society or as I
actually predicted many years ago "the end of consensus". Conspiracy theories are the epistemic mode of netocracy.

So what now?

"What
now", in the sense of how can we reinvent a politics which "works"? And
"what now" as in what are the responsibilities and strategies for
people like me who work in software and have championed the spread of
technologies of open communication? What can and should we try to build
next to "fix" the problems we've caused? Finally "what now" as in what
actual policies can be advocated for netocracy where many traditional gatekeeping epistemic strategies are no longer available.

In one sense we are seeing a burst of authoritarianism which is covering the profound weakness
of governments to control what's going on. Everyone in power wants to
control borders to prevent the movement of people. When their real
"problems" are flow of information and capital which remain harder to
control than ever. Scapegoating the poor is the standard tactic of an
elite in trouble, of course. I now think we're moving to "scapegoating
bodies" for the frustrations and failures to constrain information
(including finance which is now revealed as a subset of
information).